Speaking at a recent news conference, Ukraine’s Minister for Family, Children, and Youth Valentyna Dovzhenko said that such a forecast is contained in Ukraine’s Demographic Development Concept for 2005-2015, which has been recently endorsed by the government. She pointed out that such a drop in the nation’s population over the decade to come is expected in view of a large percentage of senior citizens in Ukraine. According to her estimates, Ukraine is currently home to 47 million. The Demographic Development Concept will be implemented in two phases: from 2005 to 2010 and from 2010 to 2015. As she put it, the concept details measures to support young families, improve the nation’s health, etc. Valentyna Dovzhenko recalled that over two billion hryvnias has been allocated for 2005 government programs to support young families. Last year’s budget allocations for this purpose came to 1.7 billion hryvnias and 390 million hryvnias in 2000. “We will seek to raise the birth rate in Ukraine by supporting young families,” she said.
Moreover, the government will work toward reducing the nation’s mortality and raising the average life expectancy. In particular, during the program’s first phase the average life expectancy is supposed to increase to 76 years for women and 67 years for men.
Any kind of population loss is an obviously negative phenomenon, says Demography and Living Standards Institute Director Serhiy Pyrozhkov. Yet similar trends are discernible in many West European countries. It’s a different matter that other factors underlie such trends in Europe. For example, even though higher living standards enable European women to answer in the affirmative when asked whether they want to have children or not, they still focus on their careers, while children are far from an immediate priority in their career-driven lives. In recent years many Ukrainian women have developed a similar mindset. Still, socioeconomic factors are one of the main reasons why far from every Ukrainian family raises two children (experts believe that families with two children can help reverse the declining population trend in Ukraine). The biological urge to procreate can be satisfied by bringing forth an only child, expert Ella Libanova once told a parliamentary hearing on demographics. Meanwhile, it is up to the government to change the prevailing opinion that having one more mouth to feed in the family can be very costly, says Serhiy Pyrozhkov. According to him, the demographic formula is simple, albeit difficult to implement.
Because in this case the government will have to cough up funds for propagating and instilling in society the idea that raising two children is an honorable mission. This means the government must think of ways to improve the welfare of this statistically average family. Second, it must work more actively to propagate a healthy lifestyle. Incidentally, last year French scholars presented their research into causes of mortality in Ukraine in the twentieth century. One of their conclusions was that Ukraine “lacks a wise healthcare policy and strategy.”
Yet Ukrainian medics disagree, saying that it is not quite correct to blame the demographic crisis on the quality of medical care. According to international standards, healthcare affects the number of long-livers in a given country by a mere 30%. The problem is that Ukrainians do not consider a healthy lifestyle to be fashionable. Hence only 60% of the nation could be called healthy to a point.
Another challenge faced by the government is the need to encourage Ukrainian labor migrants to return home, which is to be done primarily by creating jobs in Ukraine. There is also the need to regulate internal labor flows, also known as pendulum migration. The latter is evidence of economic imbalance in the development of the nation’s regions.
According to the Demography and Living Standards Institute, the positive margin between the number of immigrants and emigrants is twenty-four thousand. Yet Serhiy Pyrozhkov believes that the annual population growth of forty-seven thousand is a quite realistic target for 2015. Ways to achieve this target were mentioned above. “The situation is not yet hopeless,” demographers say unanimously, emphasizing that the government must “develop a clear action plan.” Still, the various resolutions passed by the legislators year in year out to improve the nation’s demographics are largely declarative in nature, believes Oleksandr Khomra, chair of the Socioeconomic and Demographic Security Department at the National Institute of International Security. “Unfortunately, our civic organizations that address this problem are not as numerous as those of Russia,” he says. According to him, the Russian grassroots have proposed that the lawmakers call a state of demographic emergency in Russia and consider all bills passed in parliament primarily from the viewpoint of how they will affect Russia’s demographics.
However, thus far grassroots opinions are rarely heeded in Russia, where this problem is addressed much like in Europe, i.e. with the help of migrants. It is against this background that Ukrainian demographers are attempting to prevail upon the government. Apart from convincing Ukrainian women to procreate and taking steps to reduce male mortality, it makes sense to consider a program whereby ethnic Ukrainians could be repatriated. Given the theoretical price tag carried by all these measures, they sound bitterly laughable. Yet they do not sound all that laughable against the background of the figures cited in the report by the Human Rights Commissioner (“we can safely assume that at least five million Ukrainians, depending on the season, are earning a living beyond Ukrainian territory every year”) and last year’s statistics from the Health Ministry (some 300,000 women had abortions). As for immigration, experts speak about the need to encourage ethnic Ukrainians to return home. “The melting pot does not work,” says one of the specialists, pointing to the fact that many countries are currently experiencing social tensions because of the cultural dissimilarities among migrants.
